Last week, I went over the elements of nutrition and macronutrients for a lean body composition. This week, it’s about fat loss.
Fat loss is fairly simple, but most people have incomplete or inaccurate ideas of what it takes to actually cut body fat from their body composition.
I’m going to talk about the three most effective ways for fat loss with exercise:
- Exercise to the extent that body fat, rather than food, is used as energy.
- Increasing your metabolism through cardio shortcuts.
- Increasing your metabolism through increasing muscle mass.
Exercise to the extent that body fat, rather than food, is used as energy.
The first option is pretty simple…basically, exercise long enough, and hard enough, to so that food energy is no longer sufficient to sustain performance. When food can’t be used for energy, fat is then turned into energy.
This is typically accomplished through a state called ketosis (remember, ketosis isn’t scary), where body fat is converted into energy. This is also accomplished through things like endurance cardio (bike training), strenuous sports like hockey, etc.
Increasing your metabolism through cardio shortcuts.
The second option is a shortcut with your cardio. Actually, two shortcuts.
High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, is the first shortcut and has been shown to increase your resting metabolic rate for a much greater period of time than much longer cardio sessions. In effect, you can often get more out of 20 minutes of HIIT training, than an hour on a bike.
The structure of a HIIT regimen is that you interval between intense aerobic activity, and moderate aerobic activity. This is done instead of a consistent ride on a bike or tradmill, for example. This study here, says it all:
After a 5 week conditioning period on a recumbant cycle, The High Intensithy Interval Training (HIIT) group perform sprints while the Endurance Training (ET) group performed a more traditional aerobic protocol, throughout the remaining 15 weeks. Both groups progressed in intensity. At the conclusion of the study, the HIIT group lost over 3 times as much subcutanious fat as the ET group despite expending less than half as many calories. For every calorie expended during HIIT, there was a nine fold loss of subcutanous body fat, as compared to the ET group.
Some ways that I’ve found to work best are alternating sprints with brisk walks, alternating jumping rope with crunches, or riding a bike on hilly terrain. As well, most of the newer exercise bikes have an interval training option.
The second shortcut is to exercise first thing in the morning, before breakfast. In essence, when you wake up, your body hasn’t had food (or food energy) since the last meal which may have been 8-12 hours prior. By this time, food has mostly been digested and any sort of intense activity would require energy. This energy comes from body fat.
So, doing HIIT first thing in the morning will work wonders. A couple/few pounds of fat loss a week, with a good diet, is not unreasonable.
Increasing your metabolism through increasing muscle mass.
Finally, one of the relatively unknown facets of fat los, is that muscle mass increases your metabolism, thus burning more calories. A number that I’ve heard is that each extra pound of muscle mass that you have burns up to an additional 50 calories per day.
So, how do you increase muscle mass quickly? Resistance (weight) training, and lifting s.l.o.w.l.y.
Despite the fact that it’s weight training, women will get toned with this kind of lifting, not bulky. Men can get noticeably bigger, depending on the intensity of the training regimen.
How it works is that by lifting weights slowly, you tear all of the various levels of muscle fibers. The way that most people lift relies on inertia and actually doesn’t stimulate the entire muscle. Lifting slowly get all of these layers and is actually much safer for you as well.
To maximize the effects here, you need 20-30 minutes of weight training, twice per week. Rest periods are crucial with this in order to give your muscles the time they need to rebuild themselves, hence only two workouts per week. In those 20-30 minutes, lift and lower weights with a count of 5-10 seconds up and 5-10 seconds down. Use a series of 6-8 compound exercises to hit the most muscle groups at a time, and do each exercise with an amount of weight that brings your muscle to failure after 6-8 reps.
The most common books for this principle are The Power of 10, and Slow Burn exercising, and strict research can be found here.
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